A wireless communications network that transmits using radio frequency (RF) signals is typically a shared medium network, wherein communications nodes within the wireless communications network transmit using a common frequency band. It is possible to implement virtual connections and/or tunnels between communications nodes by restricting transmissions to certain times or frequency sub-bands. The virtual connections and tunnels can be used to logically denote wireless transmission links between communications nodes.
In a wireless mesh network, for example, communications nodes can transmit to adjacent nodes using wireless transmissions links. Transmissions, however, are limited to flowing either from a communications node to a nearest wired communications node or from the nearest wired communications node to a communications node (for example, a wired communications node may be connected to an information server, a multimedia source/sink, the Internet, and so forth) and not between communications nodes. The communications nodes are wireless routers and operate to provide connectivity between mobile units connected to the wireless mesh network and the wired communications node. The transmissions would flow over wireless links that takes the transmissions closer to their intended destination. For example, if a wireless mesh network has three communications nodes (a first node, a second node, and a wired communications node), then if the first node desires to transmit to the second node, the first node would need to transmit to the wired communications node and then the wired communications node would transmit to the second node.
A technique to enforce the restriction on the communications flow is to assign time slots for all of the wireless links from a communications node. The time slots can also enable a single radio to be used for all wireless links (or the use of fewer radios than a number of wireless links), which can reduce costs by reducing the number of radios in the communications node. For example, if a communications node has four neighboring communications nodes, then four time slots can be used, with one time slot assigned to each of four wireless links. Therefore, if the communications node wants to transmit to one of the four neighboring communications nodes, then it must wait until the assigned time slot to transmit.
A prior art technique that has been used to assign time slots to wireless links is to manually configure each communications node in the wireless mesh network. A network designer would specify available wireless links for each communications node and assign a time slot for each. If the communications node has more wireless links than assigned time slots, these wireless links can be disabled. Once disabled, the wireless links cannot become active.
One disadvantage of the prior art is that the manual configuration of the wireless mesh network can be a time consuming task, especially when there is a large number of communications nodes in the wireless mesh network. Furthermore, as the number of communications nodes increases, the probability of error increases. Errors in enabling/disabling wireless links may leave portions of the wireless mesh network disconnected.
Another disadvantage of the prior art is that the manual configuration of the wireless mesh network is not dynamic. Therefore, if a wireless link (or a communications node) becomes faulty, portions of the wireless mesh network can become disconnected. Since the configuration must be performed manually, the disconnected portion of the wireless mesh network cannot rejoin the remainder of the wireless mesh network until a designer is informed and reconfigures the network.
A further disadvantage of the prior art is that the manual configuration of the wireless mesh network may not yield optimum network performance. This may lead to unintended bottlenecks that can hurt the overall performance of the wireless mesh network.